MYNHEER MOPIUS’S PARTY

Mynheer JacÓbus Mopius stood on the hearth-rug in his wife’s bedroom.

“My dear,” he said, “I must admit this—since you have taken to spending the greater part of your day up-stairs, the house has become most insufferably dull.”

For Mevrouw Mopius this remark had long ago lost all its novelty; still, she never grew to like it, even while she meekly answered,

“Yes, my dear, yes. I know. I shall be better soon.” And she added, as one of her familiar after-thoughts, “Harriet ought to amuse you.”

“Oh, Harriet amuses me fast enough,” retorted Mynheer Mopius, with unpleasing alacrity. “But you’d soon be all right if you left off remembering you were ill.”

“Yes, my dear, yes,” repeated Mevrouw Mopius, closing her faded eyes. Her cheeks were faded, her hair was faded, her flannel dressing-gown was faded. In the fading light, complacent Mynheer Mopius, looking down upon her, thought how excessively faded she was.

“Only yesterday,” Mynheer continued, triumphantly, “I purposely asked your doctor what was wrong with you. And what do you think his answer was? He said he really couldn’t tell. There!” Mynheer Mopius stood out, defiant, protruding his portly prosperity. “He—said—he—really—couldn’t—tell.”

It gave Mevrouw Mopius some comfort to learn how literally the physician fulfilled the promise she had extracted from him.

“And it’s absurd to have the whole house made wretched by an illness the doctor don’t even put a name to. If you’re not down to breakfast to-morrow I shall send for a professor from Amsterdam.”

“Don’t, JacÓbus,” gasped the lady. “I’m feeling better to-day. I really am. I don’t want no professors from anywhere.”

“But I do. Sarah, I believe you enjoy being ill. Thank goodness I can afford to cure my wife.”

“There’s another reason, besides,” he added, after a moment, “why I want you to hurry up. There’s this wedding of Ursula’s coming on. They’ve behaved very badly, I know; but Roderick was never a man to know about manners—never in society, poor fellow. However, I’m not one to take offence. I intend to give a big party here in the ‘bride-days.’”[I]

“JacÓbus!” exclaimed his wife. “Why, we don’t even know the Van Helmonts. She hasn’t even presented him here!”

“My dear, did I not say that Roderick is a boor? Josine tells me they have paid none of the customary visits on either side. In one word, they behaved as people who don’t know how to behave, and I am going to behave as a person who does know.”

“But, JacÓbus—”

“Ursula is my own sister Mary’s child. My own sainted sister Mary’s. And I shouldn’t even give a wedding-party to my own sister Mary’s only child? Sarah, it is all your increasing indolence. You are prematurely making an old woman of yourself. Look at me. I am two years your junior, but it might be twenty. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” As he said this he arranged the rose in his button-hole, with a great crackle of his blue-spotted white waistcoat. An oily satisfaction played over the yellow smoothness of his cheeks.

The truth of it was, of course, that the whole man burned with eagerness to leap, at one rush, into the glories of the great world. The opportunity was unique; it offered more than the boldest could have hoped for; we may well forgive his anxiety.

Mevrouw Mopius lay in utter collapse, a crumpled rag, against one corner of her great chintz chair.

“I want Harriet!” she said, faintly. Her husband gave a great snort of contempt as he stalked from the room.

A few minutes later Harriet entered, a novel, as usual, in her dangling hand.

“Harriet, I must have my drops,” exclaimed the invalid, sharply. “The doctor said I was to have them every two hours. And in freshly drawn water each time. I told him it couldn’t be done. Doctor, I said, I’ve nobody to fetch me the water.”

Harriet busied herself about the side-table, mechanically, and in silence.

“‘And your niece?’ said the doctor,” Mevrouw Mopius continued. “So I had to tell him you were no good.”

“Oh, he knows that,” replied Harriet. “I’m no nurse. I can’t look after sick people.”

“There’s one person you’ll nurse, if ever she’s sick,” replied Mevrouw, with a grunt, swallowing down her medicine. “Harriet, do you know the date for which Ursula’s wedding is fixed?”

“Thursday month,” curtly answered Harriet, who just now hated the fortunate bride with unreasoning envy—an envy that wrung tears from the lonely girl at night.

“What day of the month?” persisted Mevrouw, wearily.

“It’s the twenty-third.”

“Harriet, you must go across to the doctor’s for me. I can’t have him here again just yet; his coming vexes your uncle so. You must say to him—listen—word for word; you must say, ‘Aunt bids me ask: Will uncle be able to go to the wedding-feast on the sixteenth of next month?’ Just that. And you must bring back an answer—yes or no. Go along.”

“But the wedding is on the twenty-third,” protested Harriet, sulkily. “And besides, Uncle Mopius isn’t ill.”

“Yes he is,” replied the invalid, with guilty incisiveness. “You just go and do as you’re told, and come back with the answer immediate. Harriet, if you don’t say a word about it down-stairs—you’d only make your uncle nervous—I’ll give you my Florentine brooch, the mosaic of the two doves drinking. Now hurry away.”

Thus incited, Harriet sulked off through the stolid streets. If Mevrouw Mopius did not send a note to the physician, it was not only that she felt physically and autographically inadequate, but also because she confidently believed that Harriet would in any case have broken the seal.

The messenger soon reached her destination. A maid-servant admitted her into the young doctor’s private room. He was at luncheon.

“My aunt sends me to you on a fool’s errand,” she began, abruptly. “This is her literal message: ‘There’s a wedding-feast on the sixteenth’—which there isn’t—‘will Uncle Mopius be able to go?’” She hung her head with affected accentuation of the indifference she was really feeling.

The doctor hesitated and looked curiously at her.

“I’m to bring back an answer—yes or no,” she added.

“Yes or no?” repeated the doctor. “Would you mind saying it again, Miss Verveen?”

“There’s a wedding entertainment on the sixteenth,” answered Harriet, with almost ill-mannered impatience. “Will Uncle Mopius be able to go?”

The young doctor studied his boots for a minute. Then he said, slowly: “No; I believe, considering the circumstances, I may safely commit myself to a ‘No.’ As your aunt so expressly wishes it, you must tell her my opinion is ‘No.’” He was much annoyed, but he could not help himself. By this time he had got somewhat accustomed to Mevrouw Mopius, the strangest of patients, who treated him like a younger colleague called in for a consultation.

“Very good,” said Harriet. “I’ll tell her. And now, please, a little questioning on my own account. What’s the matter with Uncle Mopius?”

“Nothing, Juffrouw Harriet,” replied the young man, heartily, with sudden relief. “I am glad to be able to assure you that your excellent uncle enjoys very fair health.”

“Don’t tell me untruths, if you please,” persisted the girl, greatly in earnest. “I have very particular reasons of my own for desiring to know. What’s wrong with him? Why shouldn’t he go to a party—if there were a party—on the sixteenth?”

“Oh, he might be a little out of sorts, you know. You had better give your aunt her message. It must be rather dull for you sometimes, Juffrouw Harriet, eh?” He cast an admiring glance at her; he had quick, sympathetic eyes, good doctor’s eyes.

“By no means,” replied Harriet; but her attitude, grown suddenly listless again, belied her words. “So you see what a fool’s errand mine was! As for Aunt Sarah, of course I know she’s very ill. I wish she wasn’t. It’s very hard on me. I can’t nurse invalids, and I hate to seem unkind.”

“Oh, I’m sure you couldn’t be unkind to any one,” said the young man, sweetly. It struck him that his lunch-table looked very forlorn. “You couldn’t be, Miss Harriet.”

“Oh yes, I could,” replied Harriet, quickly. “I am always unkind, for instance, to people who call me Miss Harriet, and forget that my name is Miss Verveen.”

The doctor laughed rather awkwardly as she turned to go.

“You are quite right,” he answered; “quite right. Either Juffrouw Verveen or—not Juffrouw at all; I envy the privileged few.”

“So it’s ‘No’?” she said, with her hand on the door-knob.

“So it’s ‘No’?” he repeated, boldly, looking her straight in the face. But he read his answer there, and sobered suddenly, as the physician crushed down the lover in presence of the great tragedy so quietly enacting. “Yes, I’m afraid it must be ‘No,’” he said. “The sixteenth, you said? Tell your aunt I am awfully sorry, but as far as I am able to judge, she had better think ‘No.’”

Harriet hurried home through the autumn grayness of the sleepy little town. A peculiar smile hung fixed upon her forbidding features, a mixture of anxiety and content. She went straight up to her aunt’s bedroom.

“The answer is ‘No,’” she said.

Mevrouw Mopius made no reply. She lay back, with closed eyes and sunken jaws, almost as her niece had left her when sent forth upon this hideous errand. Harriet flung herself down on a chair, and resumed her novel. Presently she rose to slip away.

Mevrouw Mopius opened her eyes.

“Harriet, give me my tambour-frame,” she said. Harriet obediently drew forth Laban from his cupboard, and removed the sheltering tissue-paper. “I wonder could I do a stitch or two,” said Mevrouw Mopius, dolefully. She sat trying to thread a big needle with shaky fingers. Harriet waited a moment, watching her.

“Let me do it,” suggested Harriet at last.

But Aunt Sarah resented this interference.

“I wasn’t attending,” she said, angrily; “I was thinking of something else. Surely you don’t imagine I couldn’t thread a needle?”

And as she still continued trying, pitifully, tremblingly, her niece turned impatiently away.

“Do you know,” continued Mevrouw Mopius, contemplating the gaudy flare of patriarchs and camels, “I have been thinking that I should like to give it, if I can finish it, to Ursula Rovers for a wedding-present. She admired it very much when she was here. She was the only person that ever admired it.” Her voice became quite sorrowful.

“DominÉ Pock admired it,” said Harriet, soothingly.

“Yes, after dining here!” exclaimed the invalid, with a flash of grim humor. “He said Jacob must have had just such a face as that. Now, Harriet, that was flattery. For Jacob couldn’t have had exactly that sort of face.” Indeed, had the countenance of the patriarch blazed in such continuous scarlet, his uncle could never have engaged him to look after cows.

“Besides, Pock doesn’t really know about Jacob’s face,” continued Mevrouw Mopius, with a sick person’s insistence, “for I asked him myself if we had an authentic photograph”—she meant “portrait”—“and he said we hadn’t. Though we have of Joseph, he said. It seems a very great pity. I should have liked to do it from the life.”

Mevrouw Mopius sank into aggrieved consideration of the father’s remissness about sitting for his likeness as compared with the foresight shown by the son.

“Yes, I should give it to Ursula for her wedding,” she resumed, after another long pause, “unless—”

She broke off.

“Unless what?” prompted Harriet.

“Unless I should like it for a cushion in my coffin. I think that might be rather nice.”

“Aunt!” exclaimed Harriet, in real horror, and a sudden film of feeling clouded her passionate eyes.

“Why, my dear, whatever is the matter?” queried the elder lady, calmly. “All of us die some day, do we not? And when my time has come, I should like to carry away with me my last bit of work.”

“Ah, but this is not going to be your last, you know,” comforted Harriet, with the easy infatuation of the survivor.

“Well, if not, then Ursula shall certainly have it,” Mevrouw said, cheerfully. “I wish I were quite sure she would put it, as a fire-screen, in her drawing-room. Imagine my work in the drawing-room at the Horst. I should like that.” She resumed her tender contemplation of the immovably staring figures. “I am very tired,” she whispered; “go down now to your uncle, and tell him the doctor says he can have his party on the sixteenth or after. Don’t say anything about my message; your uncle’s got a cold, but he doesn’t want people to know it. There can be no objection, however, to his asking people here.”

Poor woman, she prided herself on her clumsy diplomacy.

“Let him get ready for his party,” she reflected. “It will keep him busy—meanwhile.”

In the face of Mynheer Mopius’s blindly staring selfishness, the stratagem was completely successful. Plunged up to the eyebrows in preparations for a gorgeous entertainment, which was, of course, to excel all similar ones, that gentleman forgot to notice his wife’s condition. He would run up to her with long descriptions of his arrangements, to which she listened reposefully for hours. When he went down-stairs again she smiled. He was happy, and he was letting her die in peace.

Soon Mynheer Mopius was obliged to slip over to Horstwyk to consult with the relations who had so suddenly increased in importance. He found the trio gathered in the Parsonage drawing-room to receive him, and he patted their heads all round. He even condescended to chaff Josine about “one wedding begetting another,” as they say in Dutch, and proposed that she should be bridesmaid and make up to the best man.

“I should never marry my junior. I disapprove of such matches,” replied Josine, hitting out, however unreasonably, at both Ursula and Mopius.

“Well, we can’t all marry our twin-sisters, like Abraham,” said Mopius, reddening. “Can we, Roderick?”

“Sarah was Abraham’s half-sister,” answered the DominÉ, wistfully gazing out at the placid sky.

“Well, at any rate, my Sarah’s only six years my senior, and I made it two the day we married. I’ve done my duty to the old girl. Ursula, I hope that thirty years hence you’ll be able to say as much.”

“You married for money,” retorted Josine. As her niece’s wedding-day approached, Miss Mopius’s growing disagreeableness became a source of great agitation to herself. She smelled at her vinaigrette.

“Pooh!” replied Mopius. “If so, I quadrupled the sum. Don’t be more of a nuisance than you can help, Josine, or I sha’n’t invite you to my party.”

“There are the Baron and the Baroness coming down the road,” interposed Ursula, watching her father’s flushed face.

“Where? Show me, Ursula,” cried Mopius, bounding to the window.

She laughed. “I do believe they are coming here!” she cried. “You will have to meet them now, Uncle JacÓbus.”

“I have no objection to meeting them,” replied JacÓbus, red and important. “I was going to ask them, of course, to my party. I have no objection to the aristocracy as such.”

A moment later he was bowing and smiling—bowing what he considered an eighteenth-century bow. And the Baron was expressing his delight at making the acquaintance of Ursula’s uncle, “of whom he had heard so much.” Furthermore, Mynheer van Helmont spoke with admiration of Mynheer Mopius’s villa, upon which Mynheer Mopius replied, in the kindest manner possible, that it was very nice, but not as fine as the Horst. He also proffered his invitation on the spot, and the Baroness, smiling elaborately, accepted it, as in duty bound. It was some time before her courteous husband consented to catch her eye, and then she immediately arose. In those few minutes the retired attorney had twice called Mynheer van Helmont “Baron,” and several other atrocious things had occurred. “How small she is! She needn’t look so bumptious!” thought Mopius, as the little lady shook hands. He was telling her how there would be dancing at his party, and he poked Josine in the ribs. “In my young days out at Batavia,” he said, “I used frequently to dance with the Governor-General’s lady. I dare say, Baron, you remember Steelenaar, a good Viceroy in his day?” He hoped for the honor of the opening polonaise with her ladyship.

“My dancing days are over, Mynheer,” said the Baroness, stiffly. “I doubt whether I should be able to acquit myself properly. Things have changed so much in society since my youth.”

“Ah, there you are right, Mevrouw,” replied JacÓbus Mopius with fervor. “Now, at the Drum Casino, nowadays—I am an old member—you meet people who, in your time, would not have dared to appear at a public performance.”

“I do not doubt it,” replied the Baroness, taking leave.

Husband and wife proceeded leisurely homeward. Presently the Baron said,

“My dear, I cannot understand your caring so much. Surely Mynheer Mopius is only a continuation of Juffrouw Josine.”

“I had said nothing,” replied the Baroness, quickly. “But, as you broach the subject, I must confess that I think you might have stayed half the time, and showed a quarter the courtesy.”

The Baron laughed. “He is Ursula’s single rich relation,” said the Baron. “I never forget that. And, besides, I am naturally amiable, CÉcile. It is a masculine weakness.”

“I hate money,” cried the Baroness. “If there were no money in the world there would be no vulgarity.”

“How sad that would be for the non-vulgar,” replied her consort. “Yes, he is Ursula’s single ‘prospect.’ I was aware of the fact, but, of course, he stated it. I had very good reason to be amiable.”

“He may live to be a hundred,” said the Baroness, petulantly.

“Not he. His widow might, if she were healthy, but she happens to be very ill. My dear, you put things so roughly; you love money more than I do. But I hope he will live to be a hundred. If only pour nous encourager, nous autres. We all ought to live to be a hundred; a hundred years isn’t much. As a rule it’s the widows who live on forever. We men die fast enough.”

“No, no!” cried the Baroness, drawing her arm through his. “Don’t talk like that, Theodore; I should never survive you.”

“My dear, if I can, I will give you but little opportunity. Do not forget that, when I depart, I must leave my art treasures to Otto, not to mention the Horst.”

They walked on, arm in arm, each silently busy with his own grave thoughts.

“Somehow, I have occasionally imagined of late that it wouldn’t be for long.” The Baron’s voice suddenly changed. “But that’s all nonsense,” he said, briskly. “It seems too cruel to die and leave it all.”

He swept his eyes across his fields and forests. His wife pressed his hand.

“My dear,” he said, “do you object to my lighting a cigar?”

When the sixteenth came round there was no dancing. Mynheer Mopius sat in a darkened room.

Yes, Mevrouw Mopius had provokingly died. At the last moment she resolved to take her unfinished patriarchs down into the grave with her, but she left her collection of samples to Ursula, because Ursula had shown some appreciation of her work.